Something has to change. If American truck companies are going to act as if the automotive world hasn't evolved in the last few decades, bad things could happen. American car companies throughout the 1970s and 1980s failed to see that import manufacturers did a good job studying the U.S. market and building quality vehicles at a respectable price. Many domestic offerings were soundly spanked on the test track, at the fuel pump, and at the dealership. The result? Most buyers are choosing non-domestic brands in the luxury and mainstream car segments. And now, the battle has come to segments that have traditionally been domestic strongholds--pickups and SUVs.
On the pickup side, Ford, Chevy, and Dodge have always had a stranglehold on half-ton sales and look to continue that trend for several years. But the signs are disconcerting. Nissan and Toyota have enough years under their belts and enough time in the U.S. to understand what the import-truck buyer and basic American truck guy are looking for. In fact, Toyota will offer a heavy-duty Tundra for the 2008 model year (made in the heart of truck country, San Antonio, Texas), and Nissan has plans to offer its own heavy-duty version not long after that, also to be built in the U.S.
The current Titan is an interesting example of how well non-domestic vehicles compare with the American icons in head-to-head competition. In fact, Nissan engineers went down the list of important pickup priorities and set out to beat Ford, Chevy, and Dodge in payload, horsepower, torque, towing capacity, and wide-open interior space. Nissan even learned from Toyota that it can't come out of the gate with a pickup truck that doesn't go all the way, isn't big enough, or can't do the work.
In this issue, we test all five pickups (Chevy, Dodge, Ford, Nissan, and Toyota) in configurations that make up the closest apples-to-apples comparison we've ever done before. The only real difference between any of them: The Titan didn't have four full-size doors, due to an ordering mistake on Nissan's end. And the winner wasn't a Ford, Chevy, or Dodge.
New bars have been set, and if something doesn't wake up the domestics, this bastion of American dominance will be yet another example of history repeating itself. Obviously, factors other than the products themselves contribute to this kind of evolution, but it's always been our belief that once the truck is sorted out, and the right targets are set and hit, everything else usually works itself out.